Comments on: Forging Man of Steelhttp://blog.oup.com/2013/06/forging-man-of-steel-movie-review/
Academic insights for the thinking world.Tue, 03 Mar 2015 16:32:55 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1By: Michaelhttp://blog.oup.com/2013/06/forging-man-of-steel-movie-review/#comment-468064
Tue, 25 Jun 2013 18:15:10 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=44729#comment-468064Sadly, instead of making a solid, stand alone movie, modern Hollywood is in “trilogy” mode. This movie was blatantly more of a prequel to the next two installments.
Costner and Moore were perfect casting only to be underutilized. (BTW why take the liberty to change the cause of death for Pa Kent from heart attack to death by tornado? I understand re-boots need to change-up some things but that seemed gratuitous.)
I imagine a board room full of studio execs at a marketing strategy meeting telling middle management to extend the fight scenes for filler only to lure fans into buying two more tickets to the rest of the trilogy. “Leave ‘em wanting more.”
]]>By: Eric Zimhttp://blog.oup.com/2013/06/forging-man-of-steel-movie-review/#comment-464712
Fri, 21 Jun 2013 20:47:52 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=44729#comment-464712Leaving the movie last night, I joked with friends it was called “Man of Steel” because it was all about Zod in his metal armor.

Superman was like a special appearance in the story of Zod vs Jor-El’s legacy.

They completely failed to connect Zod’s drive to fulfill his pre-destiny with Superman’s struggle to find what his destiny is, or really develop Clark as a character at all.

But I’m really curious on your take for Lois. I didn’t see her as an admirable character. She wasn’t even a character.

When do we see her smart or spunky? Other than being pretty, what is it about her that Clark could like (same is true of her to Clark)? I didn’t see any of these things.

The closest she came to spunky was insulting the army guys, but even that was clumsy and made little sense in context. I’d say she was temperamental. I at least hoped she’d continue to be blunt, strong, and aggressive.

Nope. She spent the bulk of the movie being passive, mostly watching or escaping scenes of destruction. Her interview with Superman only reveals things we already know, and there’s no chemistry between them at all. Then Superman stops talking with her to talk to the men watching the show. Ouch.

Even when she’s given a critical task to perform to finally move the story, someone else tells her exactly what to do, and she still messes up and almost fails. This would have been forgivable if 20 minutes later, another human character performs the same task, with no instruction at all, and has no more of a difficult time figuring out the alien technology than she did.

What she ended up being is cute and non-threatening for 140 minutes.

Any Adams was wasted in this movie, along with most of the cast. I think Adams did the best she could with the script, but Michael Shannon seemed to be the only person who was able to show character from flat dialog. Maybe because he was the only one with a character that had more than one dimension.